Thursday, June 3, 2010

A lot of people have been saying they think this is an above average comic. I try to listen carefully when on-the-fence or mildly-anti-xkcd folks say a comic is good, because I know I will always see xkcd through the lens of running a blog called xkcd sucks. Basically, I know I can make mistakes because of my own biases, and I try to look for signs that I'm being unfair on a certain comic.

But in this case it's not enough. I just think people are being wrong, and I dislike it. I'll admit though, that that's because it plays into some of my own personal pet peeves from xkcd, and not the more general, more objective stuff.

The main one is his terrific hatred, his utter loathing, of the mainstream media. This is, of course, common on the internet, especially among people known to love reddit.

[actually, i have to make a quick interlude on the subject of the reddit store on xkcd: i fucking love that "ladies of reddit" and i shall tell you why it is the best thing ever: 1, it is quite literally portraying women as merely attractive things to be looked at, nothing more, and this comes from the King of Womyn-Defense and Master of the White Knight, 2, they are still selling a 2010 calendar in June 2010, 3, the description says there are still 11 months left in 2010 so you should buy it, meaning the description is four months out of date, 4, they say that the money is going to charities chosen by the women in the calendar BUT ALSO that 100% of the money is going to haiti, which is great but it doesn't make mathematical sense, 5, they say they lowered the price because they were giving money to Haiti (that doesn't make sense, "we are giving the money to charity but don't worry, we also are going to make sure we make less money") when really it's just because they didn't sell and it's already June, 6, the 17 photos of the calendar are full of repeats, 7, i am pretty sure one of the ladies isn't a lady. Not the guy looking at the calendar, one of the actual subjects. THAT IS ALL RESUME REGULAR BLOGGING NOW]

OK, we were talking about reddit or something? And the media? OH YES randall loves to talk about how he hates the msm. The worst example of this is from the comic about bailouts/AIG benefits that made me perhaps angrier than any other comics he's ever made. The driving idea behind more these comics is "media people suck at their job and i know better than all of them." It's actually not a terrible sentiment, the problem is that when you make a comic like this (or write a reddit comment about it...) you will generally come off like a dick. As today's comic does, if you ask me. Particularly panel 2, where Randall has his straw-correspondent shout down the Scientist Hero and her (her!) reasonable logic. The correspondent yells "crew this!" to a scientist?? How much more badly could he have portrayed them?

[update: In response to some comments, I'm going to explain a little more here: I'm not trying to say that the MSM is beyond reproach. The issue is that this comic is making them seem way, way, worse in this case than they actually are. The comic is trying to parody blockbuster director James Cameron's involvement in the oil cleanup process, but it's a really disingenuous parody, because his involvement wasn't the media's fault. read the article I linked to there - he offered to help because he actually has a lot of experience dealing with tons of underwater robots (thanks to Titanic). So it's weird to think of the director of Avatar as being useful here, but a) it's true anyway, and b) Cameron was the one who started it, not the media. They may be doing things badly but turning to hapless directors for sensationalism is not one of them]

Then he gets to his second Theme That Bothers Me, the mocking of big budget action movies. Most clearly stated in this comic, which even uses the very same director. It's not like there's only one joke to make on the subject, but at the same time, xkcd didn't exactly explore all the possibilities here. The plot is creative, yes, I can grant that. But does that alone make it funny? I'm not sure. The story doesn't get comic emphasis (it's not the punchline) and is only funny in a sort of incidental, "hey he will exaggerate it in some crazy way" way. way way way.

Lastly, the comic does another thing that maybe pisses off me and me alone: the not-so-subtle subtle political name drop. Randall pretends that he keeps his "interest" in politics out of his comic (it's not true, as any number of examples can demonstrate) but then includes these irritating little reminders of just how closely he follows politics. There was the fivethirtyeight.com namedrop, the Ben Bernanke one, and that inauguration one, and now, James Carville. Each one makes me want to say "congratulations on knowing about that random thing, and for telling us you know all about it." It may not bother you, that's ok. It bothers me though.

I guess I haven't really talked much about the general substance of this comic. As far as it goes, the structure is ok, there are some inventive ideas, and at least a little effort at art and color. But I can't get around the little problems. If you can, I won't disagree with you. let us see what the next comic has in store!

66 comments:

I just noticed this, but this comic really has TWO punchlines; "let's ask Michael Bay" and "massively" both function as the punchline. It's like he made two different comics and put them into one. (Or maybe the Michael Bay sequence is one big punchline oh no wait that's dumb.)

However, this one still tickles my funny bone better than most recent XKCDs. Maybe I'm just a sucker for absurd humor, which this comic has in spades, but the same could possibly be said for 746, which I disliked immensely, so I dunno.

Carville is very conspicuously bald, and also has a rather small round head. So wouldn't this have been the one case where a blank circle head would be appropriate? Hasn't Randy missed the one chance to use shitty art and be right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mississippi_watershed_map_1.jpg Here is a map of the Mississippi River and the southern United States coastline. Can someone please equate that with what I'm seeing in the bottom center panel? I'm not asking for absolute photorealism or the best geography drawings ever, here, but... seriously, I have no idea what that's even supposed to be.

To me the punchline wasn't "Massively" but rather "Will this affect the midterm elections?".

Although I suppose you'd have to both follow and dislike the msm to think that's funny. Was part of your point that the mainstream media isn't as bad as everyone on the internet thinks it is, or did you simply dislike the Randall's implication that he could do a better job?

I hate to be petty, but Randall really botches the second half of this comic when he suggests Michael Bay would conceive a disaster movie scenario instead of Roland Emmerich. Yes, Bay does direct big dumb action movies but they're just that - more action, less disaster. Emmerich is the one who brought us 2012, 10000 BC, The Day After Tomorrow, and ID4 and Godzilla back in the day.

Just as he lazily gave the reporter guy the lame straw man lines he lazily throws in Michael Bay as the go-to dumb Hollywood director type.

I think it's quite a good comic. I don't get why Carl thinks that mocking the mainstream media is a bad thing; "you will generally come off like a dick" seems a bit unsubstantiated. And this is a bizarre question: "How much more badly could he have portrayed them?" - come on, they're only acting in a shallow, sensationalist manner. They're not being dishonest or deliberately misleading, they're not hounding anyone to their deaths or to the extent of wrecking their lives, they're not slandering anyone. No lies are told, no-one gets hurt. It's not all that bad.

Also, if the comic is meant to be a sneer at Mr. Bay, it fails miserably. The scenario he puts forth is totally awesome.

The setup was terrible, but the absurdity of the disaster made me smile, so I'm going to call this one a mild success. It would be nice if I hadn't had to slow down in order to see the wall of flame as "roiling, alligator-filled" and not as "rolling, alligator-filled", though.

I found 749 kind of annoying because I don't see how any of the posters asking for participants in a scientific study that I've ever seen could lead to kidney harvesting. They're generally vision/blood/cognitive tests. And even these almost never have any tags taken out.

But what really bugs me is that there haven't been any kidney-harvesting schemes masquerading as scientific studies as far as I know.

You know one thing that irritates me about the Michael Bay sneering? Yep, Randall is all "these action films are ridiculous" and all that, but remember that one comic in which Stick Randall says Die Hard 4.0 is "too talky" and proposes "River Tam Beats Up Everyone" as the be-all-end-all epitome of awesomeness? That is, when it interests HIS OWN fetishes, it's alright, otherwise it sucks. I hate that.

749 really gets on my nerves! The actual formula for the joke is commonplace, but usually good. Emphasis on usually, since usually the two subjects of the joke are actually correlated.Instead, it's as if Randall found the joke formula, thought "hey, I can make a comic using this", reach into a hat full of paper strips with a subject matter on each one, and take out "study" and "kidney stealing".

Oh, and then he felt "okay my viewers are morons who won't be able to tell the difference themselves" and put in another line confirming that, yes, the study is in fact a kidney scam!

And the alt-text is... oh god. Okay, if you don't get it, it's basically saying "Volunteers needed for a study on the effects of contact with paper covered with poison ivy. Please take one strip.". Which is an actual legitimate joke, humorous and all!So if it's such a good joke, why didn't he just say it normally? Oh, because it's a prime opportunity to wrap it up in scientific jargon and turn it into a sort of puzzle. So that his scientific readers can read it, decypher it, realise the joke, and have one big laugh! Not only is it added humour, but it requires additional thinking too, which is so rare nowadays ever since webcomic artists started getting obsessed with being just concise and witty. You can even put it on your 10 Things That Make You Think list, just under TED!

...or, if you missed what I'm getting at:Randall didn't make it clear because HE TOOK THE OPPORTUNITY TO TURN IT INTO PURE, UNFILTERED PANDERING TO THE SCIENCE CROWD!

Also, since nobody's mentioned it yet, the new Homestuck animation is REALLY FLIPPING AMAZING!

The dark arrow is the Atchafalaya River, and the area the arrow points to is Morgan City. The Atchafalaya would be the main river channel to the Gulf if it weren't for the Old River Control Structure that keeps the Mississippi flowing past New Orleans.

I don't really consider mentioning Ben Bernanke namedropping. That's like saying mentioning Nancy Pelosi or Eric Holder or Joe Biden is name dropping-- a USAian should know who they, even if they don't follow politics. You should kind of know the names of the people who run your country, yanno?

Hi Rioghasarig. You can just call me Leonard. It's why my name is in underlined orange type over my post. So you know who wrote it.

I suppose I can't prove that the joke was stolen, but my point is that it was very unoriginal. A joke can involve a guy walking into a bar and still be original and funny. But Randall's comics didn't really add anything. The Michael Bay comic was just overwrought and anticlimactic after the punchline, which, in my opinion, occurred in panel 2 (how's that for PPD, Carl?) and the most recent comic was just lazy (and the execution was poor too--"healthy o-type individuals only GET IT WE'RE A SCAM THAT'S THE JOKE").

Despite the quality of XKCD not having improved even the least, XKCDexplained has been gold lately.

"Kidney theft is an urban legend wherein an unwitting traveler has his or her kidney harvested for transplant without permission. A story about a traveler waking up in a bathtub full of ice with a hastily stitched up side and a note saying “go to the hospital” made the rounds via email in the late 90’s.

Your curators have written about the author’s fascination with the trappings of science before. Not content with just a veneer of science, the author is fusing his fascinations on science with his fantasies about harvesting organs from unwilling patients. His fantasies are clearly evolving, and it won’t be long now until he must act them out.

Statistically speaking, most serial killers are white males in their twenties or thirties who target strangers near their homes or places of work. Childhood developmental characteristics of serial killers most frequently include day dreaming, compulsive masturbation, and isolation. The isolation of a serial killer often leads to feelings of inadequacy, often in relation to the opposite sex. In other words, the archetypal male protagonist of most xkcd comics."

Plasma, you missed the point of the scientific obfuscation in the alt text. It wasn't for the purpose of the reader, but for the purpose of whomever is considering taking a strip of paper. By being an obscure explanation, it seems more innocent, and thus more likely to elicit a response of "Ooh, that sounds neat, I'll take one!"

Maybe I'm giving Randall the benefit of the doubt, but I think it actually serves to help the joke, rather than being obscure for the sake of it.

Totally unrelated to the latest strips, but I feel like I need to share this Omegle game with you:

Stranger: make me a sandwichYou: noStranger: sudo make me a sandwichYou: you can't d.... okay, wait a minuteYou: here's your sandwichStranger: kthxStranger: xkcd?Stranger: or just Linux?You: xkcdStranger: okYou: I was familiar with it before that comic, thoughStranger: okYou: even though i don't really like linuxStranger: get outYou: noStranger: sudo get outYou: god damnit

I hate XKCD as much as the next person on this blog so I try to ignore any qualms I have with your posts, but you are being ridiculous. Are you really saying that exaggeration isn't a legitimate form of humor?

There's just something ironic about saying xkcd comes off "like a dick" when you've created an entire website to tear down someone else's creation for no other reason than to prove your own superiority.

How about creating a competing comic and see how well you do.... dick.

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

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